Turning Raw
by seilleanmor
Summary: A post-ep for 7.01 Driven


**A/N: A post ep for 7.01 _Driven_. I haven't read any others yet, so if it happens to resemble them it's purely coincidental.**

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><p>too many of the best cells in my body<p>

are itching, feeling jagged, turning raw

**_Of Mutability_, Jo Shapcott**

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><p>"You cut your hair."<p>

It's such a ridiculous, inane thing to say with his fiancée crying quietly into the elephant-grey flannel of his robe and his face still raw and wind chapped. Possibly the least important of all the things they have to talk about, all the apologies he has to make, and Kate offers him a bubble of wet laughter and lifts her head.

"Yeah, I. . .yeah."

Rick brings his free hand up, still feeling a little jerky, a little like his limbs are attached with string rather than sinew, and smoothes his fingers over the curve of Kate's skull and down towards her jaw. "It's beautiful. _You_ are beautiful. And I'm so sorry I never got to see you in your wedding dress. I couldn't wait for that."

"Please stop apologising." Her voice is soft, careful with him, but even as she snuggles into his chest she seems distant. Two months is a long time to be apart - the longest since they first got together - and he knows that it will be a while before the shock of what happened drains away from Kate's taught, slender frame. "I'm the one that should be sorry."

"For what?"

"For ever believing that you could have staged your disappearance. That you didn't want me anymore." Her voice comes apart around a sob, knuckles a milky white where her hand fists in his shirt. And he can't stop thinking about how she must have cried for him, curled up alone in the middle of their bed.

This is. . .wonderful, holding her like this, but he needs her closer. Rick unfastens the tie at his waist and draws his robe off as slowly as he can, pressing his lips to Kate's forehead when she lifts up so he can take it all the way off. He drops it to the floor next to their bed and then he reaches for Kate, tugs her own robe off and lets it pool right on top of his, the blue nestled into the brown-grey of his own like a lake, an oasis.

Kate shivers, back ramrod straight as she sits on the end of their bed apart from him, and Rick grits his teeth. This is the strongest woman he knows, the most extraordinary, and she looks like a little girl steeling herself against more hurt.

It's a well-practiced manoeuvre to peel back the sheets and set the dress pillows on the floor out of the way. Once he's finished turning down their bed he moves for the end of it and kneels down, takes both of Kate's hands in his own. Her head is bowed, her chin tucked snug against her chest like the brace position and Rick drops a kiss to her knee through the material of her pants.

"Kate. Let's go to bed." He murmurs for her and she jerks, lifts her head to look at him. In the careful, hesitant lamplight of their bedroom his face doesn't look quite so ghastly and raw as it did in the hospital, but Kate reaches out for him and smoothes her fingers over the edge of his cheekbone right where it feels split open.

Rick gets to his feet; that old skiing injury protests loudly as he does but he keeps it off of his face, doesn't want her to see him wince. Not when she already looks so torn up over the parts of him she can't heal. Her fingers have always been slender in his, long and thin, and it's just the same now when he reclaims one of her hands and draws her up to stand with him.

There's a moment where everything dangles by a hair, those one-sided two months he desperately wishes to reclaim a thread from which everything between them hangs and then it snaps and Kate tips forward into him, her hands snaking underneath his shirt to trace circles over the bare skin of his waist.

Forehead pressing hard at his clavicle, Kate releases a long breath as she comes down from her crying jag. She's trembling; his hand splays between the sharp slashes of her shoulder blades and he drops a trio of kisses to the crown of her head, cradles the back of her skull with his free hand.

"Shh, I know." He soothes, shifting his weight from foot to foot the way he used to when Alexis was tiny and wailing against his chest. "It's okay, Kate. I'm home now. All of the rest of it, we can figure out together."

Kate pulls back from him, so very tiny in her bare feet, and meets his eyes. He told her all those years ago that her eyes are gorgeous, but now when she looks at him and they melt into something soft and knowing he feels as if he might come untethered from the earth altogether if not for her.

"I missed you. So much." Kate whispers, ducking her head again. He hates how self-conscious she suddenly is, how guilty she feels over having doubted him.

He doesn't blame her for that for a moment. With the overwhelming evidence, and the great black cloud of grief obscuring her brain, he can completely understand why the seeds of disbelief in them began to be nourished.

"Kate?" Hands coming up, he traces the bow of her lips with the pad of his thumb, cups her face in his palms. "I waited. Can I kiss you now?"

"Rick." She chokes out, and then she rocks forward onto her toes and smudges her mouth over his own. The way she just comes alight, both hands sifting through his hair and her tongue flirting with the seam of his lips, makes him grunt. Her body meets his with such force that he has to fight the urge to take a stumbling step back, moving forwards instead until their hips nestle together.

His mind is blank of those two months, a foot falling through the air above the missing final stair of his memories, but his body remembers. He has been parched, famished of Kate and the taste of her is virulent as it ripples through him.

When they break apart, breath relishing its catch and drag at both of their chests, Kate is crying again. He panics for just a moment, horrified that maybe he's also forgotten some fundamental part of how it is with her, that he's kissed her all wrong.

Before he manages to get his mouth open to ask, Kate swipes at her salt-slick cheeks and cracks open on a smile for him. "Sorry. I thought I was done crying. I just. . .never thought I'd get to kiss you again."

"Hey." He presses another burst of a kiss against her mouth, settles his forehead against hers. "We have so many kisses in our future, Kate Beckett."

She whimpers, her face crumpling, but at least she doesn't let the curtain of her hair fall forward to hide it from him. Not this time. "Please don't call me that."

"Your name?"

"I'm supposed to have been Mrs Castle for two months. I was so excited to be your wife, Rick." Her explanation comes quiet and watery, but she stays in his arms and his heart rolls over in gratitude and relief both.

If he's honest with himself, he's still panicked. When he woke up to the pale moon of his daughter's face and the over exuberant clucking of his mother, he had wanted Kate so desperately that the first thing out of his mouth was her name. The hysteria had only escalated the longer she was apart from him, and then when she had arrived and she'd stayed at the foot of his bed and her heart was locked up tight in a cage fifteen years old, the recede of anxiety that he had been wishing for never came.

He's been on edge ever since, and it has made him flippant and brash and that in turn has sent the woman he loves further inside of herself. "We're gonna get there, Kate. I want to be your husband so badly. Once things settle down and we get some answers, we're going to get married. If you still want that."

"Of course I do." She says sharply, pinning him under her stare. "I love you. What happened doesn't change that."

It's the first time she's said it since he woke up in the hospital. It has been all he's wanted to hear, and relief threatens to take his legs out from under him. "I love you, too. Thank you for not giving up on me."

"Let's go to sleep." She murmurs, and then Kate leads him right into bed with her and curls up at his back, her nose snug against his spine. For him, they slept last night in each other's arms, but for her it has been two awful months and he feels it in every trembling breath she lets out.

He wants to roll over and gather her against him, but her fingers are fisted so tightly in the material of his shirt that he's not sure he would even be able to.

Rick has failed her. By missing their wedding, by doing whatever it is he has no recollection of that made her think he ever could have wanted to leave her. In this, he won't fail her again. He'll let her cry quietly against his shoulder if that's what she needs.


End file.
